It's Day 4 of no Yahoo e-mail for some users. The legendary Internet company said it was still working "tirelessly" to fix the problems, and expected to have e-mails delivered by sometime Friday afternoon.

On Thursday, Yahoo tweeted it was attempting "to restore access to those still having issues." On their status page, the company also said on Thursday afternoon that it was "continuing to deliver queued messages and work on resolving all other outstanding issues," with updates as warranted.

Yahoo added that "97 percent of affected users have access to their Mail accounts on Web, POP and the Yahoo Mail iOS, Android and Windows 8 apps," with 80 percent of queued messages that had been sent from late on the evening of 12.9.13 until Thursday having been delivered.

'Harder to Fix' than Expected

The company had said on Wednesday that the root of the outage appeared to be a hardware problem in one of its mail data centers, but "the issue has been harder to fix than we originally expected." No details were given of exactly what the hardware issue was, or why it was more complicated than first thought.

As the days of outage for affected users stretch on, criticism of Yahoo is growing. Some Web commenters, for instance, have noted that the company has shown a lack of sophistication about public relations in how it has handled inquiries from the press or from users.

Yahoo has about 100 million users who employ the Web-based e-mail service daily. As the company tries to improve its bottom line, a key question is how many of the affected users will depart for another free mail service, such as Gmail.

Effect on Mayer?

Those departures, or simply the bad publicity that has hounded the company during this outage, could have a profound effect on the ultimate success or lack thereof of company CEO Marissa Mayer, who has been leading a vigorous effort to turn the company around.

This outage, for instance, comes on top of waves of complaints about the new Yahoo Mail design. It offers a more modern, streamlined look to the venerable e-mail service, but has eliminated some common functions, like tabs, and hidden others, like saving an e-mail as a draft or sorting mail into folders. Thousands of users have posted complaints on the Yahoo user forum, such as requests for the company to bring back the previous design's tabs. Eventually, Yahoo marked "completed" at the end of various posting threads to close them off.

This four-day outage for some users has also been preceded by frequent mini-outages, assumedly for much larger numbers. It has become quite common for Yahoo Mail users, when trying to retrieve e-mails, to encounter a notice that the system is busy or "we're experiencing some technical difficulties," advising that they should try again later. These mini-outages do not last for long, but make up for that in their frequency.

Harder to fix? You've redesigned the whole bloody page so the best fix would be to have left the whole thing alone. Now it is the most frustrating piece of rubbish to work with. I work from home so it's a bit difficult to switch providers at such short notice but believe me when I have time in the new year to notify everyone, I'll be moving on. Yahoo email is TERRIBLE and I won't hesitate to tell people so.

Jim Heath:

Posted: 2013-12-13 @ 5:09pm PT

I agree that Yahoo needs to do a much better job of handling their public relations. It is inexcusable for a company this large to be so inept at handling their customers.

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